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62 UCLA L. Rev. 1156 (2015)
Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice

handle is hein.journals/uclalr62 and id is 1163 raw text is: Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice
Allegra M. McLeod
ABSTRACT
This Article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison
abolition and what I will call a prison abolitionist ethic. Prisons and punitive policing
produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair,
and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor
repair the very sorts of harms they are supposed to address-interpersonal violence,
addiction, mental illness, and sexual abuse, among others. Yet despite persistent and
increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison-
backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals
of criminal law-principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retributive
justice-might be pursued by means entirely apart from criminal law enforcement.
Abandoning prison-backed punishment and punitive policing remains generally
unfathomable. This Article argues that the general reluctance to engage seriously an
abolitionist framework represents a failure of moral, legal, and political imagination. If
abolition is understood to entail simply the immediate tearing down of all prison walls,
then it is easy to dismiss abolition as unthinkable. But if abolition consists instead of
an aspirational ethic and a framework of gradual decarceration, which entails a positive
substitution of other regulatory forms for criminal regulation, then the inattention to
abolition in criminal law scholarship and reformist discourse comes into focus as a more
troubling absence. Although violent crime prevention and proportional punishment of
wrongdoing purportedly justify imprisonment, this Article illuminates how the ends of
criminal law might be accomplished in large measure through institutions aside from
criminal law administration. More specifically, this Article explores a form of grounded
preventive justice neglected in existing scholarly, legal, and policy accounts. Grounded
preventive justice offers a positive substitutive account of abolition that aims to displace
criminal law enforcement through meaningful justice reinvestment to strengthen the
social arm of the state and improve human welfare. This positive substitutive abolitionist
framework would operate by expanding social projects to prevent the need for carceral
responses, decriminalizing less serious infractions, improving the design of spaces and
products to reduce opportunities for offending, redeveloping and greening urban
spaces, proliferating restorative forms of redress, and creating both safe harbors for
individuals at risk of or fleeing violence and alternative livelihoods for persons subject
to criminal law enforcement. By exploring prison abolition and grounded preventive
justice in tandem, this Article offers a positive ethical, legal, and institutional framework
for conceptualizing abolition, crime prevention, and grounded justice together.

62 UCLA L. REv. 1156 (2015)

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